THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE
tremity of the island, overtopping by
about 2,500 feet an old crater in the
interior, which till recently was still
flooded by a " boiling" lake-that is,
heated by thermal springs bubbling up
from the bottom, and every five minutes
upheaving the waters in a foaming col
umn.
Within a short distance of the
margin the tarn was no less than 300
feet deep. In 1880 great landslips took
place, new craters were opened in the
hills, the columns of water disappeared,
and the lacustrine basin lost much of its
beauty. The fissures emitting gases
were continually shifting their position,
and the rivulet flowing from the lake
was swollen along its course by springs
of sulphurous water descending from
crevasses in the upland valley.
The boiling lake of Dominica is a
great caldera surrounded by precipitous
cliffs several hundred feet in height, at
the bottom of which is a large valley,
originally reeking with thick white sul
phur vapor, which turned black every
article of silver carried on the bodies of
persons who overlooked it. The soft
bed of lapilli that paves the floor of the
caldera is incrusted with sulphur in
spots, from which rises a mixture of
boiling water and steam, making a con
stant tumult of noises. The waters
white, black, and red in color-rush out
in a strong torrent, scalding hot.
A traveler describes this caldera as
fenced in by steep perpendicular banks
or cliffs, varying from 60 to 1oo feet
high, cut out of ash and pumice. In the
bottom of this was a giant seething cal
dron, which raged and roared like a
wild beast in a cage. Toward the cen
ter, where the ebullition was fiercest,
geyser-like masses were thrown up to a
height of several feet, not always from
the same spot, but shifting from side to
side, each burst being preceded by a
noise like the firing of a cannon. The
heat of the water was 185' Fahrenheit.
The height of the lake was a little over
2,400 feet above the sea.
The volcanic phenomena of Marti
nique, which are the subject of this
article, will be more fully described in
the succeeding pages.
The crater at St Lucia known as Sul
phur Mountain has an elevation of
1,000 feet and covers about four acres;
the sides are barren and covered by de
posits of sulphur.
In the days of
French possession a sanitarium was
built around the boiling springs of its
northern slope.
This volcano, 4,000 feet high, is still
active, and in the chasms of its crater,
lined with deposits of sulphur, the erup
tive matter is constantly in a state of ebul
lition. Copious thermal waters bubble
up in various parts of the island and
one of the sulphurous streams still flows
through a half - ruined establishment
erected by the French before the Revo
lution. This soufriere occupies the
floor of a steep crater cone and is pierced
by a dozen large calderas, circular in
form, 4 to 16 feet in diameter, each
boiling furiously, one with coal-black
water, another with milky white, a
third with gray mud, a fourth with a
mixture of all these, while the count
less apertures, some barely an inch
across, send up steam or hot water in
noisy jets, and have done so since the
first memories of the earliest colonists,
nearly three centuries ago.
ST VINCENT BEFORE THE LAST
ERUPTION
That St Vincent is volcanic is appar
ent from recent events, the relation of
which must be left to those who are
studying it, my recent visit having been
confined to Martinique.
Before the present eruption the sum
mit of La Soufriere, at the northern
end of St Vincent, was 3,500 feet above
sea-level, and had two craters. The
first was three miles in circumference
and 500 feet deep, and was separated
from what is known as the new crater
232